ient, the point of honour on the
western front from Dixmude to Verdun, had been given into the keeping of
the Canadian army. During those long and terrible months, in the face of
a continued bombardment and of successive counter-attacks, with the
line growing thinner, week by week, hacked up by woefully inadequate
artillery, the Canadian army had held on with the grim tenacity of death
itself. There was nothing that they could do but hold on. To push the
salient deeper into the enemy lines would only emphasise the difficulty
and danger of their position. The role assigned them was that of simply
holding steady with what ultimate objective in view no one seemed to
know.

Week by week, and month after month, the Canadian battalions had
moved up into the salient, had done their "tours," building up their
obliterated parapets, digging out their choked-up water-courses,
revetting their crumbling trenches, and rebuilding their flimsy dugouts,
and then returning to their reserve lines, always leaving behind them in
hastily dug graves over the parados of their trenches, or in the little
improvised cemeteries by Hooge, or Maple Copse or Hill 60, a few more of
their comrades, and ever sending down the line their maimed and broken
to be refitted for war or discharged again to civilian life. It
was altogether a ghastly business, a kind of warfare calling for an
endurance of the finest temper and a courage of the highest quality.

From this grim and endless test of endurance, the Canadians had
discovered a form of relief known as a "trench raid," a special
development of trench warfare which later came to be adopted by their
comrades of the French and British armies. It was a form of sport, grim
enough, deadly enough, greatly enjoyed by the Canadian soldiers; and
the battalion which had successfully pulled off a trench raid always
returned to its lines in a state of high exaltation. They had been able
to give Fritz a little of what they had been receiving during these
weary months.

While the battalion waited with ever-growing impatience for the order
that would send them "up the line," a group of officers was gathered
in the senior major's hut for the purpose of studying in detail some
photographs, secured by our aircraft, of the enemy trenches immediately
opposite their own sector of the front line. They had finished their
study, and were engaged in the diverting and pleasant exercise of
ragging each other. The particular subje